Menopause Can Lead to Suicidal Thoughts – My Mum Took Her Own Life (The Times)

Tier 1: Established: peer-reviewed research or government health authority
Publisher: The Times · Published: August 21, 2026 · Accessed: August 30, 2026

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Claims this source supports

• A daughter's first-person account (by Charlotte Lytton, Aug 2026) describes her mother dying by suicide at 44 during early medical menopause, after being unable to take HRT due to a family history of breast and ovarian cancer and being prescribed antidepressants instead.
• The account is one of the highest-profile mainstream news pieces connecting menopause directly to suicidal thoughts, and was widely recirculated by menopause clinicians and researchers including Dr Louise Newson.
• The piece is a cultural-context source: it carries no clinical claims of its own, but it documents a real family experience of the peri/menopause mental-health crisis.
• Suicide is widely misunderstood – and its link to menopause is 'completely overlooked,' per the daughter (Amy Cook), who works in mental health and shared the story to push for better menopause mental-health care.